Oh, sir, you do me great disservice; it was not for my own sake that I transferred my silly ditty to another thread, but for the greater glory of Mom. Surely even you can see that plainly. For to see it as you have insinuated, you would have to believe that some great acclaim would accrue to me as a person by the readers of said anthology, which is in truth merely a thread upon the 'Cat and no greate Booke at all. And such a precept therefore falls to dust before the merest inspection, and without such a premise on which to predicate your implication, it has no merit, and must yield to the more reasonable Case.

I would refute your words, Goode Sire, save that I must prepare for a meeting of the bibliotecal Trustees this post meridian. Hence I will forebear the retorts and arguments which crowd my keyboard aimply remind you commune hoc ignorantiae vitium est: quae nescias, nequicquam esse profiteri.

Oh, Pshaw, your pretentious eloquence is void and nul, free of merit, and absent all bearing on the question. That the ignorant among our species will reject knowledge or learning is an easy assertion, but nothing to do with my small sins, sirrah. You are a braggart and a granfalloon.

"your pretentious eloquence is void and nul, free of merit, and absent all bearing on the question"

Oh! Marvelous! By God, I can find many useful occasions in the future for using those very words, I just know it. Only I'll change "void and nul" to "null and void". I can hardly wait. But whom shall I inflict them upon? Bill D? Lonesome E.J.? Spaw? Stilly River Sage? Guest from Sanity? Bearded Bruce? Amos himself???

I'll have to think carefully about it. Such choice words should be hoarded like the finest wine and saved for the perfect moment.

As for randomization, you seem to forget that I work in a public library.

This afternoon, for instance, the Board of Trustees agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding with the local United Way to transfer a Winnebago from a UW agency to the Library for use as a bookmobile, PROVIDED that the City Council agrees. This would transfer the title from the UW Agency to the Friends of the Library after the Friends give the UW Agency $5,000, who would immediately transfer the title to the Library as an agency of the City, EXCEPT that the UW Agency would act in a very advisory capacity for the usable life of the unit UNLESS the arrangement was terminated by mutual agreement before then.

I've only been working on this since December, right after we got the dinosaur.

A man can dream, a man can think, and sometimes deeply feel. A man can scheme and curse and drink, and lose his even keel. Oh, a man can chase after many a goal, He can strive for wealth like a real asshole, Or spend life watching the waters roll, Where the oceans meet the fields. But the test of a man who is truly a man Is to do everything that a real man can To weaken the grip of reality's brand, And throw off the cold realistic hand, And make lesser thinkers' minds rock and reel, Turning red to mauve and white to teal, Leaving systems of thought all in dishabile, As he makes things more surreal, my lads, Makes things more surreal.

On the other hand, the trend so clearly set by Hemingway toward super-dense, unembellished prose can obviously be carried so far as to completely undermine intelligibility. Acknowledgements to Ye Mon of Bookes for so eruditely making the case.

Yeah, look what it did to Henry Fonda! He got so drunk on it one night that he ran off and shacked up with the chambermaid for the night. Of course, he was aghast when he woke up the next morning and hastily beat a retreat, covered with embarassment. He never acknowledged the girl, even though it later turned out she was pregnant as a result of the liaison.

She gave birth to a boy, but gave up on trying to get Henry to take responsibility, settling for some payoff or other to forget about it, and she moved up to a small coastal town in Oregon and raised the lad --whonm she had named Hargrove, after her own father--as a single mom for years. Finally when he was about nine, he asked his mother where he had come from, and she had to face the big question of how much to tell him.

I did 'em, Amos. Would I do else? And if you think so, you still gotta prove it. And my wife's a LAWYER who taught me all sorts of law stuff about untellectual properties and things. So I just say to you, "Ipso ex post facto, de minimis non regit lex", which was clearly established in U.S. v. Burr, Ariz. Terr. v. Wyatt Earp, et al., Crown v. Louis Riel, and of course, Falwell v. Flynt. And this can all be ultimately decided, as so many cases in the Old West have been, by the precedents set in such cases John Henry Holliday, et al. v. Clanton Family, et al., City of Northfield, Minn. v. Frank and Jesse James, et al., City of Coffeyville, Kans. v. Gratt Dalton, et al., and many others.

Far past the unsheathed range of night, Beyond the plane where mortal beings stress, Struggling to master lesser rights And fearing greater wrongs to e'er confess, Beyond the realm where human turmoil reigns And cruel force reduces all to nil, There is a sphere, free from contriving pain, Where all is whim, and light, and Will.

In these high ranges darkness yields to light, And high creative spirit bans duress; Here is the answer to the mortal night, Immortal font of all true, pure, B.S. None here does suffer from confusion's strains Nor stumbles, crushed in flesh and will; Here doth every soul their right regain, And in creative honor shine both bright and still.

These are the powerful sources of our Mother's hand, Which do inform her every smile and turn; Then, stranger, follow, to a better land, Where bright B.S. doth every honor earn, And proud BS' torches burn, and burn.

Antony Anstyly Where Dwells The Not Murk and Maunder, pubs. New London, 2001

I had a friend, upon a time, and a mighty friend was he. His tongue went loop-de-loop-de-loop, and his blade went "Snicker! Snee!". His fingers typed words of delight Dancing like light gone mad, But he disappeared quite late, one night, And the story turned out bad.

It seems his door was knocked upon, When most folks were in bed, By two large gents in wrinkled suits And large, and wrinkled, heads. They said he had been singled out, That someone Big was pissed, Berated him as a useless lout, And a goddamned plagiarist.

They listed tomes and poems and works He'd borrowed for a while, And touted up and frilled out In inimitable style. The said he'd never paid a dime To those whose works he'd borrow, And all of this was coming back, To visit him with sorrow.

They told him he was going away, Into the darkling deeps Where bad men worry through the day, And fret too much to sleep. Where hard men break, and life is hard, And you scramble for what you get, And there's no such thing as e-mail, OR a high-speed Internet.

My friend, he blanched, he paled, he flinched, He knew that he'd done wrong, He knew that even then his screen Held a half-baked stolen song. He realized then -- too late, too late -- He should have listened, way back when, To his dear Mom; too late, too late, He was heard from ne'er again.

And so I come to this Cafe, To write, and to forget, But something still recalls to me This friend I think on yet. I never learned if he had ever re-crossed that chilling schism That split him from the world he loved, On account of plagiarism.

So good folks all, pray heed this call, Think of this man, cast doon, And make your good works all your own, From your own hand, alone. Steal not the works of other men, Or lines of other poets; For if you do, they'll come for you, And everyone will know it.

Amos, it isn't your overloaded prose and your flamboyant verbal pomposity that trouble me...in fact, I find them entertaining on a slow day. Neither am I offended when you veer into pretentious and interminable soliloquies masquerading as humorous "art".

No, what troubles me is the bottomless spew of vague generalizations and unanchored negative nabobbery, the clouds of flimsy propositions without coherent referents, the categorical defamations without relevant detail, and the other forms of scurrilous semantic bandaloggery that make you so hard to understand. My impression is that bringing about understanding is really not very high among your priorities which seem more weighted in favor of obdurate rightousness and histrionic venting.

1. Rapaire has a long history of posting other people's work and not indicating whose it was, leaving the less acute to surmise he was generating it himself.

2. Of late he (for reasons I cannot imagine) dug up three such original works from pasts posts I had written, and in a fit of the most imitative flattery, posted them here over his own name without reference. When I called him on it, he asserted most brazenly that he had done the owrks in question.

3. I saw fit, therefore, to chastise him by reposting my own piece on the Fate of the Plagiarizer, to remind him of his sins, plus one or two other things.

Now, what about that is unclear, unspecific, or inexact in your fevered view?

Well, Amos, I feel that your implication that Rapaire's frequent use of plagiarism is a willful behavior rather than a born and immutable condition beyond his conscious control is the keystone of your ignorance. From false premises all things--including bizarre tangential zig-zags--are possible.

I have such a program here as well, Rapaire. It is set to match the keyboard efforts of a room full of drunken monkeys and spew out vast amounts of what equates, basically, to verbal diarrhea (?), devoid of useful content, yet impressive in its sheer volume...

The odd thing is, though, it keeps coming up with stuff that reproduces almost word for word things that Amos has posted at one time or another on this forum. Strange, isn't it? ;-)

Most unusual. Obviously I have single-handedly proven able to do what a hundred monkeys could not.

Rapaire, give o'er--don't make me go track down chapter and verse of my posts, word for word identical to the ones about which you explicitly wrote, "I did 'em, Amos. Would I do else? And if you think so, you still gotta prove it...".

There are, for example, only two posts in the Forum containing the expression "ostrich wel". One is you rplagiarized one, and the other is my 2007 original:

This is good, Rapaire. Amos is now getting so engrossed in tracking down your plagiarising of him and exposing it that he won't have time to get anything useful done. ;-) He may even crack under the strain. He may get too distracted to notice the tunnel we're digging under his foundations....or the truck that's bringing in the plastic explosives.